Recently On Behind the Shutter

Laptop living is the new business model. Travel the world with your laptop and work from a beach somewhere and surf all day with your GoPro making your friends and family jealous. If I see one more Instagram story encouraging me to buy into this lifestyle, I might kill myself.

Photography is a career field that carries with it incredible pride and requires an unstoppable love for the human spirit and even the puppy world now and then. If you think of your photography as just a job, then it’s time to find a new career.

For the past several months in The Business Corner, we’ve been building your sales system from the ground up in order to get you to your target sales average. Now it’s time to put all your hard work into action. It’s time to craft your client experience workflow to maximize your sales potential. That workflow starts the moment a potential client inquires.

After one long travel month in 2017, my wife Eileen and I felt utterly pooped. Where was the old thrill we’d experienced as destination photographers? It was buried under a mountain of luggage and stress. We had to find a new packing system that brought joy back into our on-the-go lifestyle.Let’s look at our five essential categories we use to save space, the gear we bring and, finally, Peak Design’s new Travel Backpack that lets us access everything in one bag.

I wasn’t always able to sell digitals the way I sell products. In fact, the word digital scared me. I had put so much work into learning how to sell products and testing my approaches that I hadn’t even thought about how to sell digitals. Through learning how to sell products, I learned how to build value for the products I was offering. The albums and wall galleries were family heirlooms that served as a valuable daily reminder of what is most important to people. Having something in your home you can look up at every day and feel better about the troubles you’re facing is priceless. I could sell that all day long to my clients because I understood the value of it.

My single greatest business achievement is my return client base. They all are of means, and they stick with me year after year even though they have lots of options and they are informed consumers. Their unwavering support means more to me than anything I could accomplish photographically. New photographers coming up are very talented and competition can be fierce. The fact that my clients stick with me keeps me going. It forces me to level up my craft, my product offerings, my marketing.

In the wedding world, especially, it’s easy to think we’re making a ton of money because we take in a lot of money. The problem is that we need to spend it elsewhere. When was the last time you looked at your cost of sales, cost of business and how much time you spend? We end up making a lot less than we think we do, and there’s no way we’ve set ourselves up for the future.

My wedding career spanned many years. I stuck with it because I made good money. I found myself stuck in a creative rut, searching for who I was as an artist. I did not know where to start, but I knew I was ready for another adventure that would shake things up. That’s when I found “sportraits” and adventure photography—the inspiration and creative outlet that reinvented me as a portrait artist.

Adobe Camera Raw is the solution for nondestructive editing from Lightroom to Photoshop using Smart Objects. This is useful for Lightroom to Photoshop, but what about Photoshop actions into Lightroom? Adobe’s recent improvements give us the ability to create Custom Color Profiles in Camera Raw, so we can flex our creativity with Photoshop actions and Custom Color Profiles by exporting Look Up Tables, or LUTs. Th­is is a massive overhaul for Photoshop that makes our Lightroom workflow even more powerful.

One thing that separates me from the other photographers in my area is the client experience I offer. We go places, plan setups, and use creative and exotic outfits and secret locations. We shoot with cars, horses, pets, guitars, guns, buildings, bridges and friends. But when we sit down with Mom and Dad to order, you know what they buy? Close-ups. The ones that show all of that beauty, the expressions, the smile they invested so much in, the sparkle, uniqueness and joy. This month, I show you how I incorporate close-ups with every outfit and location I shoot.